The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature

Demonstrating how struggles over gender and class were mediated through formal properties of writing, The Rhetoric of Concealment offers a new framework for the discussion of court literature and middle-class literature in the English Renaissance. Rosemary Kegl offers powerful readings of works by Puttenham, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Deloney and considers an array of other texts including journals, gynecological and obstetrical writings, misogynist tracts, defenses of women, prescriptive literature on companionate marriage, royal proclamations, legal records, and town charters.
Kegl's readings center on a recurrent rhetorical gesture in the work of each author - riddling disclosure in Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie, the logic of unsound bodies and buildings in Sidney's Arcadia, the network of insults in Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, and the collection of proverbial wisdom in Deloney's Jack of Newbury. Asking what sorts of social relations such gestures promote, she analyzes how they help to mediate the relationships between, on the one hand, patterns of economic exploitation and, on the other, absolutism, popular rebellion, social mobility, the jurisdiction of ecclesiastical and secular courts, the structure of guilds, and the relative authority of town government. Kegl also traces interrelationships between such rhetorical gestures and the language used to describe Elizabeth's rule, the gendered division of labor, the situation of propertied widows, and the prosecution and punishment, in ecclesiastical courts and in shaming rituals, of women's verbal and sexual excesses. By way of conclusion, she takes up recent work by Karen Newman and Richard Halpern in order to discuss the role that Renaissance historical criticism may play in contemporary cultural studies.

Rosemary Kegl is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Rochester.